Sunday, June 14, 2009

Endlessly Infinite Coincidence

Last Summer, while on vacation, I experienced the musical/literary coincidence of hearing the title line in the song “I Was Looking For a Job When I Found This One” at the exact moment that I read that sentence in an unrelated book.

My recent Spring vacation now has its own musicliterary coincidence, though this is more of a stretch.

While we were in Carmel, we stumbled upon a quaint little restaurant (they really need to repair the sidewalk outside their front door). We went in to check it out and I was surprised to see, on the hostess stand of Carmel’s “most romantic restaurant”, CDs of the soundtrack from “The Endless Summer” for sale.

Now, the name “The Endless Summer” may sound romantic but, if so, you are confusing it with “A Summer Place”, a sappy soap opera of a film that teen girls watched while their boyfriends were fantasizing about riding waves around the world instead of their girlfriends.

I was pretty young when both of those came out – still learning about love and sex from New Yorker cartoons - but while my older sister mooned over Troy Donahue in “A Summer Place”, I developed a crush on global beaches. For a major milestone birthday I had a couple years ago, I put my “Endless Summer” DVD on repeat during the entire party.

I am not sure when we saw "A Summer Place". Our mother would not allow us to go to "Gidget" or the "Beach Blanket" films or any movies involving co-ed teens in bathing suits because Parents Magazine did not approve of them. I have digressed, but I added this in the interest of full disclosure, which is what I think Parents and my mother were afraid was happening in those bikini movies but was not.

Back to the coincidence: The Casanova restaurant was opened by Belgian, Walter Georis, who wrote the music for “The Endless Summer” along with his brother Gaston. (The surf music tradition is now carried on by Nico and Max).

Okay, we get the serendipitous music discovery, JohnnyB, where does the book part of this musicliterary coincidence referred to in your Endless Blog Post come in?

Hold on!

Upon returning from our trip, my sister put up a post about “Infinite Summer”, which challenges people to read some book called “Infinite Jest" over the Summer. Get it? “Infinite Summer” = “Endless Summer”, right? What? I told you it was a stretch.

Speaking of coincidences. Last night I was having a long conversation with someone about movies and I was trying to explain how funny I thought Brad Pitt was in that movie, you know the Coen brother movie, I can't remember the name, something Burning.... Then this morning I log on and start checking some of my favorite blogs and the first one I go to is talking about Burn After Reading. Doh!